


and the world sings back

by Rigil_Kentauris



Category: Fire Emblem Heroes
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Nightmares, One Shot, POV Third Person, Plot Bunny, Pre-Slash, dark curse issues, i feel like this is almost OC/OC at this point, manakete-ish!Emblians, pre pre pre canon, somewhat character study i suppose, writing character tags for this was surreal anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 10:25:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16217108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: He has dreams where he is flying. He can feel the land. He can feel hisdestiny...but he can also feel the voice, telling him there is another, stronger way, if only he would listen...





	and the world sings back

**Author's Note:**

> intsys: nobody want extraneous worldbuilding at 3am  
> me: OH BOY 3 AM
> 
> anyway this is one of three chapters but i forgot what the rest was supposed to be so for now consider this it

He has dreams where he is flying.

He can feel the land beneath him as surely as if he’d been kneeling to touch it with one palm, because the air _is_ the land, all is one, and he is one part of it. He stretches his wings in the night and roars, a fierce call of triumph, and the world cries back, infinitely loud. It shakes him apart and leaves him with a cooling sense of finality and belonging. It’s no challenge, the overwhelming power of the world, but a welcome.

_My child. You return._

He takes to wyvern riding as easily as he took to walking. The manifold praises are as warm as the hopeful light of the silverwhite moon.

He is a humble child.

_I dream I am a dragon,_ he tells his tutors. _That’s why I’m good._

His words are motivated by the language of the planet.

It’s a language they do not speak.

Their eyes harden, and their movements become stiff, and he is banished forever to learning how to fight from horseback, like a proper little lord.

-

He has dreams where he is flying.

The oceans roil in endless storms. He flies over them, and lets his wings dip through the raging waves.

When he shouts for joy the waves sing back. When he wakes up the wind calls for him.

_A whisper, my child._

And he heeds.

When his mother asks why he is cracking the windows, snapping through good glass with a bloodied, shard-encrusted hand, he simply tells her he has a fever, and needs the air.

Her eyes harden, and her movements become stiff.

She takes him into her arms, all elbows and iron strength.

_Oh little one,_ she says. _Are you lying to me?_

He struggles, more for effort than for show.

_Never, mother,_ he swears.

But the window is still cracked, and through it, he can smell on the breeze the distant rising of a supercell swirling atop an ocean yet unmapped by human minds.

Her eyes widen.

_No,_ she breathes.

Then she cries.

He holds her. Gangly elbows and a shocked lack of young strength.

_Mother?_ he asks, trying to look at her face.

She lifts it free from his shoulder, and looks at him. The depth in her eyes is familiar only because he has seen himself fly over similar chasms, in his ocean-drowned dreams.

She smiles a little, and tucks one a longer tuft of his pure white hair behind his ear.

A trait of his fathers.

_I had hoped…_ she says, and trails off.

_The storm won’t hit us!_ he says, anxious now to soothe the strangeness away. _Don’t worry! It’s far away!_

His mother bursts into tears again.

Through the sobbing, she manages _but you’ve always been more like me._

_Haven’t you?_

_-_

He has dreams he is fighting.

There are a hundred people, clad in armor. They swarm his scaled form, and try to find the weak spots.

He exults. He has no weaknesses.

He screams the wordless terror of the terrifying, a clattering reptilian warning.

It will not help the people at his feet. It isn’t even _meant_ to. It is a message spoken in the language of the land that needs stand ready to receive the blood of its human children.

Some cower at the sound. They are speared through by his teeth, long and elegant. Effortless, he thinks. The others are spiked and smashed by claws – or talons – or feet? He is not sure. The dreams dissolve into real life, and he spins into his next _skaetha-_ blade strike. It slashes open the traitor’s sword arm, and they drop onto their knees, grasping at the dirt.

A young prince of Embla shows no mercy towards his enemies.

He flips his weapon, and stabs it down through the cowed back of his target, spearing the traitor-marked-for-execution against the ground. He makes sure he uses enough force to sink the weapon into the soil. The is the task he busies himself with, in the never-ending, never-existing stretch of time it takes for the traitor to die.

The _skaetha_ spears through the corpse like a tooth.

When the judges compliment him on his skill, he thanks his training.

He knows better than what he wants to.

-

He has dreams he is fighting.

This thing he fights has no form. It is darkless, lightless. Shapeless, massless. A thing without sense or feel. He slashes and claws, but the effort does nothing. It swarms and chokes, but its attacks cause no harm. He is trapped in an unending, unchanging, exhausting cycle of attack and dodge. There is no ground beneath him. He feels he is both flying and falling at the same time. His claws dig for purchase, but there is no land, no base. Only an aching in his claws that pierces so hard he awakens, suddenly.

He wakes up screaming.

He chokes on the sound, once he can hear it.

He chokes on the silence, once he can hear that.

He calls and the world says nothing back.

He calls

and calls

and calls.

And finally, an answer.

_Kill,_ is all the world tells him, in a soft and careful voice. It’s odd. It’s not a feel, not a sensation. It’s a word. A word unlike any the world has given him, but it is noise after nothing, and he could cry with the relief of it.

Then someone bangs on his door with grief in their call, and his servants rouse themselves to their routine, and before he is knows what is happening, his mother the empress is dead.

He cries, and he strikes out. _Kill,_ the world told him, and he thinks perhaps he should.

But someone catches his hand, and uncurls it, and notices the crescent bleeding scars his fingernails have dug while he was sleeping.

_My lord,_ the servant says, an awful worry.

_I had-_ he answers, the words ‘a bad dream’ caught in his throat like a swirl of immovable darkness and lightness .

_A nightmare,_ he finally finishes.

The room cools several degrees. The world is one of magic, and thus, of superstition. He can see in their eyes, knows what will happen, knows how fast the rumors about his role in his mother’s death will spread as certainly as he find s he now knows how many trees the castle has, how the blade s of grass waver in the wind, and how in the deep of the earth some slow, sluggish fire churns.

_My lord,_ the servant repeats, taking a step back, head bowed.

The fact that he is right is only a dull comfort, and a short-lived one.

Meanwhile, the suspicions will last forever.

-

He dreams he’s burning.

He screams endlessly, but only the fire answers back.

And can it really be called an answer? After all, what it echoes back at him is only the sound of his own thick keratin scales baking and popping and dissolving in unendurable bursts of searing pain.

The burns are so bad he can’t move. Sometimes during the day he’s too paralyzed to take a step, too blocked by fear that he can’t convince his legs to move. He remembers what brittle, burned skin feels like. He knows what breaking that tissue feels like.

He knows what thick, infected, septic, slogging blood tastes like as it rolls down his knobby, horned forehead past once long, shining incisors.

In the heat, there is little else to drink.

He looks up sometimes, in the dream. Beyond the fire he can almost, _almost_ make out a slightly brighter point of light. A round, clever point. A cruel, glinting point of light.

The part of him that speaks the other language recognizes the dragon for what it is.

The only time the fire stops is when the other dragon stops breathing long enough to whisper, _kill._

He is the emperor. He is the judge, _and_ the executioner. He takes a sword to the back of the marked body’s neck, and shouts at the assembled court a promise, that what blood that has been stolen will be returned to them.

And when he removes the life from his enemies, the pain eases, a little.

-

He dreams he’s burning.

He collapses in the middle of a corridor, in the middle of some great speech by his economic advisor about something that concerns the words of men. He seizes, and he is burning.

He screams, and he is s hushed, by people who do not understand what he is asking.

She is there, to deliver a report. An enemy spy, an enemy insofar as she does not work solely for Embla, and thus, cannot be trusted.

But trust is a word made by men.

She speaks a stronger language.

She looks at him while they his advisors shush and coo, meets his gaze and kneels to touch the ground. A reminder.

An insult – as if he could forget how to center himself.

A witness to his humiliation, because he _has_ forgotten.

He rolls out of the grasp of his advisors, connects with the ground, and through the land, something surges.

_KILL,_ it orders him, fed up and angry.

The surge is power.

Pure, sweet power.

The kind stronger than burning.

It overwhelms, it invades. It encompasses, like the warm light of the moon. He moves without a thought , snatching the plain, steel dagger from his boot and implanting it solidly in the center of the chest of his economic advisor. The knife connects with bone, and the reverberations should be shattering all feeling in the nerves in his arm. Yet he feels nothing.

He dismisses it this fact without a thought. The resounding flow of soothing force emanating from the voice in his head is more than enough of a response to content him.

This is the language of the world.

Her eyes jolt with the fear of the shocked, but regain their neutral composure almost immediately.

The other advisors fall silent. They begin, he thinks, to recognize him for who he is.

_You take after your mother, I see,_ she says, after a moment.

He starts.

Now _this_ is burning.

-

He dreams he’s burning.

She explains.

_We suspect the emblian royal line is infected by a curse,_ she explains.

_We?_ he says.

_That’s not important._

He begs to differ. It’s the _most_ important thing. How can he trust her, if he doesn’t even know whence she comes?

She scoffs at him.

_Trust is the construct of men,_ she says. He freezes.

_Don’t worry,_ she adds, with a troubled, pained smile. _I’m more emblian than you will ever be._

She is.

It’s in her everything.

Her voice. Her language. The way she moves, with the liquid grace and snapping awkward unpredictability of fire. Easing through the space as she destroys what used to be there, and now, it's only her. Until she leaves, and air and land return.

The way her Emblian court clothing holds onto her form for a split-second, tracing the strong, lithe outlines of enemy-born body before it shifts again, as she moves.

And she is _always_ moving.

He dreams he is burning.

_Lust is a construct of men,_ she reminds.

He freezes.

_And besides,_ she asks. _Don’t you want something more than that?_

_Don’t you remember how to fly?_

 

He does.

 

He burns. He wakes. He finds her, and sits cross-legged on the deep rugs in her appointed guest chamber time after time, night after night, when his eyes are red with sleepiness, and the nightmares have set his hands to shaking, and there is no hope of help other than the desperate thought that perhaps, some sense can be made of it all.

_Tell me,_ she says, and he does.

And she tells him back.

_Her_ dreams. Of flying. Of fighting. Of losing.

_What do you know of dragons?_ she asks, one night.

He thinks of the eye in the storm that burns him alive. The one he tells her of, in hushed, fearful tones.

_Nothing,_ he decides.

She tells him of Embla. The deep legends. A dragon god, with domain over the land. Partner to Askr, creator of the sentiences in the land.

_To embla the land, and askr the people,_ she recites. _But that’s a common misconception._

He knows.

He’s talked to the world.

To call the land not part of the people…

He remembers, distantly, a dream he once had.

She walks away from the large glass panes of the window and sits beside him.

She radiates heat.

_We believe the emblian royal line made a pact, long ago, with someone or some_ thing. She reaches out and catches his arm, turns it over, presses her fingers deep into his flesh, over the bloodlines in his wrist.

_Do you feel it?_ she asks.

The fire that runs from her touch through his body is different than the kind in his dreams. It is almost pleasant.

_We?_ he asks, breathless. Hopeless.

_We,_ she answers, firmly.

Then she rises. Her clasped hand over his wrist turns into a light tugging, a request for him to stand that he follows .

_I need to show you something,_ she says. Her eyes are dark, and solemn. _May I?_ she asks, in the language of men.

He wiggles his hand around until he can lace their fingers, and hold hers in his.

The fire that goes through him is that of embers, is that of sparks.

Is that of small lights existing and then ceasing, all the brighter for it.

He is almost afraid to move, too blocked by the fear of remembered pain of a much higher degree.

Then she cracks a smile. A language he does not understand in the least.

_Alright then,_ she says.

 

He is burning. With laughter, with curiosity, with a giddy childishness. She is silent and deadly serious, because, he realizes, sneaking past guards to get in and out of the places she ought not be is her line of work. But his is one of yelling challenges to the world that cannot hear the voice of smaller mortals, and the way he stumbles to hold still in the night is…

Amusing.

Even to him.

He feels like a child caught raiding the kitchen, or at least like how he imagined that would have been.

She turns back to him to administer an invective, but sees his face.

And they aren’t caught, which helps.

Even the voice is still tonight.

The hill she brings him to is far, far outside the bounds of the castle proper. Is even outside of the town surrounding it. Is minutes upon minutes of walking, and by the time he gets there, he realizes he’s going to have to exert a good deal of power to make sure she faces no repercussions when they inevitably arrive back long after his guard have dropped into a panicked search mode.

_Wait here,_ she says, and takes a dozen long paces away from him, to the absolute top rise of the hill.

She untangles her hair from its solid locked metal tie, shaking the long bundle of pure white out of its tightly controlled corral into a shining, full mess of soft locks. The bangle she drops into the grass, and it lands with a painfully loud clunk.

He winces, and touches his own in sympathy.

She breathes for a moment, and looks up at the starlit black sky.

She glances back at him.

_Have you ever…_ she calls, then her almost dark skin deepens with a blush of red. _Ah...been with someone?_

He chokes on air. He can’t quite splutter a response.

_Hm,_ she says, blush deepening. His own face is, well… _This might be awkward._

_Try to pay attention nonetheless._

She turns back away from him, and before he can catch up, she is taking off her overshirt. A pure black affair, with thin gold trim along the edges and the seams. Otherwise unadorned, as is the court fashion of the day. Under that is the loose white all lace shift, a perfect lattice of delicate, waving work that forms enough of a layer to technically count as cover.

It’s thin enough to cling to every muscled curve of her waist, the slow dip of her spine, resting lightly on the top of the hemline of her pants. Showing nothing and everything all at once.

If he could deny that he was blushing before, he can’t now.

And then that shirt too is gone, her removing it delicately, with slow, stretched movements born of the necessity of not tearing the expensive fabric. Slow, stretched movements that cannot help but show off the capable languid power in her arms, the vibrant elegance of her motions. The comfort she has in her own body.

He tries not to stare, but oh gods, he’s staring as she slips out of her loose, flowing, black linen pants.

She isn’t wearing any underclothes.

For some godsforsaken reason she hasn’t a single stitch of underclothes.

The nervous heat that’s taken residence in his face spreads in a war march across the entirety of the rest of him.

The only thing she _is_ wearing now is a curious metal link necklace.

_Okay,_ she says under her breath, more to herself than him.

She shivers. There are goosebumps standing all across her skin. Or...are there? The ones on her back seem to grow, small knobs forming along her spine, curved claw-like spikes forming out of nowhere. He takes a step back. Her skin darkens further, thickens, whorls of scaled patterns appearing and changing.

She falls to her knees, both palms against the earth, but it’s already…

Her, and not her.

A scale and claw thing, with wings that are there without him seeing where they’ve come from. His eyes hurt with the effort of watching, they slide off, he forces them back.

He only glances away for a second, but when he looks back, there is a dragon.

Massive. Terrfiying. Deep, aching black scales interspersed with shots of pure silver scales, the size and shape of curved, simple leaves. Wickedly curved teeth longer than his arms. A tail so long and heavy that when it _whaps_ the ground he nearly loses his balance. Then it – she – rears back, slams against the ground, spreads her wings and…

It’s pure noise. His human mind can’t make sense of it, its the kind of sound that defies human instinct, exists outside of it, not a part of it, beyond and above it. The alienness pierces through his heart and sends more fear through him than he can handle, terror in its essence. The sound itself is so heavy, so _loud,_ that it pushes him over and knocks him flat on his backside and leaves him staring up at the sky into which the dragon has launched herself.

The membrane of her wings is so thin he can almost _see_ the silver of the moon through them.

But not quite.

She roars again, but this time, she is far high in the sky.The terror the sound inspires is cooled enough to allow him to breathe.

He swallows, hard, and stays sitting while he watches her fly.

On one pass, she dips close enough to him and the ground to ruffle his hair with the tremendous stirring of the wind her wings creates.

He can almost hear the world laughing with joy.

He relaxes, if only the most minuscule amount.

 

Days later, once she’s landed, once they’ve walked back, once he’s asked her a hundred million questions about every sensation that she could answer only with a _it’s hard to explain in words,_ days after he and she have stayed apart long enough to appease his furious advisors, even his rage-bound economic advisor, she finds him.

She drops from the rafters in his Signing of Things room. Both his guards have bows leveled at her chest immediately, but he waves them away as if they are no one, and nothing.

_May I speak to you alone?_ she asks, with a sideways glance at his guards.

He joins her on the nearest balcony, and she has in her hands her silver necklace.

_They wanted me to give you this,_ she says, and holds it out.

It’s an odd, intricately linked chain, but strangest of all is the scale that’s been hung on it by interlinked chainmail links. It’s a large, gently curved scale, pure silver reflectiveness, with the beginnings of a chaffed, chipped, softer part at the top ends, almost like the base of a fingernail. He could mistake it for a silver version of the platescale armor the commonality wears, or the Askrans, except when he accepts it, he finds it weighs…

Well, it doesn’t seem to weight anything at all. All the heft comes from the unfairly heavy chain.

_It’s an Embla scale,_ she explains, while he turns it over and over in his hands reverently. _I have to get another for me before I can teach you._

_It can be taught?_ he asks, gaze torn away from the scale by surprise.

_I thought you’d ask who ‘they’ are,_ she responds instead, amusement in her tone.

He’s been thinking nonstop. Nonetheless, when he tells her ‘ _they’ are_ _people like us, aren’t they...people who are cursed,_ he is mildly surprised to have her confirm it.

_Although,_ she amends. _Many prefer the term ‘gifted’._

_And you?_ he asks.

She laughs, a bark of delight that melts her face into a confident, happy picture, then she flips backwards of the balcony.

He dashes over, heart in his mouth, but when he looks, there is only a small wyvern spreading its wings and flying off into the afternoon, leaving him on the hook for explaining to his guards what exactly he’s done with the enemy spy he just had.

He can’t find it in himself to be annoyed.

Between the wonder and the curiosity and the light burning through him, there isn’t any room left for annoyance.


End file.
